I take another sip of my glass of shitty $4.49 Riesling as another carpenter ant crawls up my unshaved shin. Is this what I’ve become? I think to myself. I sip once more, knowing fully well I will have heartburn in 20 minutes. Damn this wine is shitty.

Last night was supposed to be fun. I was supposed to be fun. Instead, I found myself covering my crotch when he went for the tie on my shorts. I wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. The last time I did it, bad things happened to me. Very bad things.

His mouth felt the same as all of their mouths: taut and wet. It was as if when I kissed him, I was kissing all of them. Every guy I had ever been with. Which, for your information, wasn’t actually that many. But they still remained, despite that.

My phone dinged and vibrated. “You have a new message from Carl.” I let out a sigh and force-touched the screen to open the message. I skimmed the speech bubble’s contents and replied with the usual “It’s going. You?” I wasn’t that original.

Another sip. I didn’t want to waste the nice bottle of Riesling from the local winery. That was too good. Too good for me. Here comes the heartburn, I shutter as acid from my stomach filters into my throat.

Knock, knock. My roommate was at the door. I put the glass of wine under my desk and walked towards the door.

When I first told my family I was capable of such evil, they didn’t believe me. I was a good girl. I was the favorite child. I was not a bad person.

“You didn’t do anything bad. You didn’t know about him.”

I should have known. I should have remembered my place.

My mom attempted to console me on the phone as I laid in my twin XL bed hidden under the covers. I hadn’t gotten out of bed yet for the day. I didn’t feel like it. The tears from my eyes made contact with the glass of my iPhone and made a greater area of my cheek wet. I hadn’t stopped crying today. I didn’t feel like it.

My roommate came back from the dining hall and just looked at me under the large duvet. She went back to her work and I knew that was the cue to hang up the phone. I pressed the red circle on its white icon and went back to bed.

I saw her. I saw the girlfriend on the plaza the next day. She looked through me. I looked down. The tears came back.

I’ve found myself stuck in a maze for the past two weeks. I don’t know where I’m supposed to go. At the moment, I’m sipping a matcha latte and staring at a shelf full of Jose Cuervo. I’ve found a new place that I can inhabit. It’s a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop a block away from my apartment. It has orange and white striped walls and tiny wooden tables accompanied by chairs clad in floral padded seats. It’s quite nice.

However, I still don’t know where I get out of this maze. I’ve made many varied attempts. I hung out with the same Jose Cuervo this past Saturday night and made friends with a flattened hamburger on my floor. I immersed myself in Sense8 and pasta with solely Parmesan cheese instead of watching a rightfully underrated musical group perform. Despite these varied measures, I still don’t feel like I’ve found the exit of this feeling: one of sadness and confusion about such sadness.

Someone once told me to think of the unknown causes of emotions this way: imagine a man standing on a bridge with water below. His pants are on fire. He doesn’t know why his pants are on fire. He tries to think back to whether he was smoking or if there was a fire nearby. But he shouldn’t do that. He should just jump into the damn water and put out the fire on his pants.

I know this will pass. “This too shall pass,” my grandma always tells me. I hate that saying; she says it too damn much. I also hate “everything happens for a reason.” Sure things need to have some root cause, but you can’t always know the reason. Sometimes you just need to do keep on trying doing something good for you now and think about the cause later. Sometimes you just need to jump in the water.

I find the opposite of a kiss to be indifference. To be purely disinterested and detached. To not have a care at all for that mouth that was once on yours. To not have a care that he or she deleted you. To even not have a care that he or she doesn’t look as good as once before.

All because you didn’t even really care in the first place.

But this indifference cannot exist without the kiss. That kiss, that connection, that attraction. With the knowledge these are possible, indifference doesn’t come so hard.